Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Mount Auburn Cemetery is a huge area in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was established in 1831 as the US's first landscaped cemetery, with several lakes and many impressive trees, shrubs and flowers. People seem to come here as much for the plants and birds as the famous graves, and it's even considered a wonderful place for a first date. For fifty cents you can pick up a map showing the site of the graves or memorials of the most famous people here, or you can find lesser known ones on a computer in the visitor center. Unfortunately, we arrived here just as it was threatening to rain, and that threat established itself as a major torrent for the rest of the afternoon, so we had to return the following day. Needless to say, virtually all the graves below are of writers or people with assocations with writers.

William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was a Unitarian preacher who had a profound effect on the Transcendentalists. There is a statue of him in Boston Public Garden.

This grave is of two poets: James Russell Lowell (1819-91) and his wife Maria White Lowell (1821-53), who was a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society who before their marriage persuaded James to become an abolitionist. They lived at Elmwood, James's birthplace not far from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's home. One of his books written at Elmwood and published anonymously, A Fable for Critics: A Glance at a Few of Our Literary Progenies (1848), satirized a number of literary figures of the day.

Poet and novelist Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907) was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and his widow Lilian turned their house into a memorial to him, which in 1979 became part of the much larger Strawbery (sic) Banke Museum. He spent most of his youth in the South with his father, and later in New York. Between these two periods, though - from to 1952 - he went back to Portsmouth to live with his grandfather.

On marrying in 1865 he moved to Boston, where he began writing by drawing heavily on his years in Portsmouth with his grandfather, and the result was the novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870). It was the first realistic treatment of boys in literature, and was an inspiration to Mark Twain.

Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) was born in Cambridge, educated at Harvard, and influenced by John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites. He translated some of Dante's work, and edited North American Review with James Russell Lowell. He traveled a great deal in Europe and was friendly with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin (whose literary executor he became), and Edward FitzGerald. He is perhaps best known as an art historian, and until his retirement was for more than twenty years professor of the History of Art at Harvard.

Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) was an abolitionist and a poet who is undoubtedly best remembered for her patriot song 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', which is set to the tune of 'John Brown's Body', which became very popular during the Civil War on the Yankee side. She later devoted herself to women's welfare. Her autobiography, Reminiscences: 1819–1899 (1899) is here.

The polymath Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), or 'Bucky' as he is usually more affectionately remembered, is noted - along with his sense of humor, tremendous energy, etc - for his popularization of the geodesic dome, one of which became his home during his stay at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, which I believe I've mentioned elsewhere. 'Call me Trimtab'? Please don't ask - it's science, and I'd no doubt get any explanation hopelessly wrong.

Popularly, Margaret Fuller is perhaps best remembered for the effect she created among the sages of Concord, Massachusetts. Here, the memorial speaks in her many abilities, and of the tragedy of her death, along with that of her husband and son on the same occasion:

IN MEMORY OF

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI

BORN IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS., MAY 23, 1810

BY BIRTH A CHILD OF NEW ENGLAND

BY ADOPTION A CITIZEN OF ROME

BY GENIUS BELONGING TO THE WORLD

IN YOUTH

AN INSATIATE STUDENT SEEKING THE HIGHEST CULTURE

IN RIPER YEARS

TEACHER, WRITER, CRITIC OF LITERATURE AND ART

IN MATURER AGE

COMPANION AND HELPER OF MANY

EARNEST REFORMER IN AMERICA AND EUROPE

AND OF HER HUSBAND

GIOVANNI ANGELO, MARQUIS OSSOLI

HE GAVE UP RANK, STATION AND HOME

FOR THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

AND FOR HIS WIFE AND CHILD

AND OF THAT CHILD

ANGLELO EUGENE PHILIP OSSOLI

BORN IN RIETI, ITALY, SEPT. 5, 1848

WHOSE DUST REPOSES AT THE FOOT OF THIS STONE

THEY PASSED FROM LIFE TOGETHER

BY SHIPWRECK JULY 19, 1850

It's always heartening to find a personal touch on a grave, however ephemeral it may be. But the note here has survived the long downpour of the previous day: 'Oh Robert! How I miss your advice, help, emails, letters, and your New England /yet Southwestern voice on the phone! 4.30.11'. That tells us a thing or two about Robert Creeley (1926-2005).

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) was born in Brookline, now part of greater Boston, and came from a wealthy family whose money derived from cotton: the Massachusetts towns Lowell and Lawrence are named after the two industrialists John Amory Lowell, her paternal grandfather, and Abbott Lawrence, her maternal grandfather.

She didn't begin writing poetry until 1902, when she was inspired by the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse. In 1912 she published her first book of poetry - A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass - and met actress Ada Dwyer Russell. Poetically, Lowell identified herself with imagism, although Ezra Pond disparagingly called it 'Amygism'.

Lowell began a 'Boston marriage' with Russell and wrote poems that clearly concerned the love of women. When Lowell died, Russell, both Lowell's executrix and her heir, destroyed personal correspondence accordingly to Lowell's instructions.

Fanny Merritt Farmer (1857-1915) was born in Boston and grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, but due to illness in her teens was forced to stay at home and do the cooking for her family and boarders her family took in, which she later developed into a career. She studied and graduated from the Boston Cooking School, and within four years was Principal.

Farmer detested vague, unscientific cooking instructions such as 'heaping cup' and 'rounded teaspoon', and the hard-earned publication of the clumsily named Boston Cooking Book Cook Book - latterly simply known as Fannie Farmer - was a huge success.

The Longfellow plot is large and impressive. As repetition is pointless, I shall make no comments now because I shall speak more of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82) when we visit his house and grounds - but alas, not the interior (we were out of season) - in a later post.

Francis Parkman (1823-93) is most noted The Oregon Trail (1849), and maybe that's the best entry into his work: his life just seems too bizarre for me to take in at the moment, so the book's here.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) was so impressed by the publication of a newspaper article revealing the impending scrapping of an 18th century frigate, the USS Constitution, that he wrote the poem 'Old Ironsides' in 1930 as a tribute to the ship, and the great publicity caused by it led to the ship being preserved: it is now a tourist attraction. And although he's mainly remembered as a poet - he was often called upon to write commemorative verse - it was in the medical profession that he devoted most of his energy, first as a doctor and later as a lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

Jacob Bigelow (1787-1879) was the architect of Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the photo below gives an idea of how impressive it is:

This is Halcyon Lake, with Egerton Swartwout's monument to Mary Baker Eddy to the cente right reflected in the water.

A close-up of the monument. Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) was the founder of Christian Science, and has briefly been mentioned below in relation to the Mary Baker Eddy Library on Massachusetts Avenue, Boston. She wrote a number of religious books.

Britaine

Slump, by Will Self

Gallia – Ménie Muriel Dowie

Gallia (1895) is a rather obscure novel which emphatically belongs to the New Woman sub-genre, and concerns a young intellectual woman who refuses to comply with the prevailing gender constructs: this is a Victorian woman with spunk.

Westering Women

Chancy develops the theory of culture-lacune, a revolutionary strategy by means of which Haitian women writers both celebrate and fight the absence and the loss which has been the female voice in the history of the country. In Haitian women writers, a folkloric figure is used as a tool: they 'reformulate the marabout eternalized in Oswald Durand's still popular folksong "Choucoune" of 1883.' Whereas Durand's Choucoune is a figure of betrayal who stands for a lost Haiti, the women writers transform her and reclaim her for themselves. Some writers included in this study are Anne–christine d'Adesky, Ghislaine Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, Edwidge Danticat, and the earlier writers Virgile Valcin, and Annie Desroy.

The Clansman – Thomas Dixon

The Marrow of Tradition – Charles W. Chesnutt

At the end of The Marrow of Tradition (1901), the black Dr Miller enters the house of the white Carteret family in an attempt to save the life of their young child. Previously, Major Carteret had not allowed Miller to tend to his son because Miller is black, and Miller's own young son has just died in a skirmish instigated by the Major himself. Clearly, Chesnutt's focus of interest is not on the fate of the white family's son, but on the integrity of Dr Miller. The novel is set 'Wellington', although there are parallels between this fictional town and Wilmington, North Carolina, which was the scene of a 'race riot' in 1898. Dr Miller represents the 'New Negro', the educated, ambitious and socially aware black person beginning to emerge through many years of slavery in the Southern states, through the subservience of Uncle Tomism, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and now through the appalling compromise of the Jim Crow laws in the South.* Most of all, though, all black people have to battle against a wall of prejudice that still exists, where whites not only segregate and bar, but are only too eager, particularly via lynching, to apply the rule of the mob. The book is a kind of thriller and obviously is influenced by many Victorian novels that have gone before it (and there is an unfortunate strong touch of melodrama towards the end), but it is evident that the novel's main purpose is didactic. *Along with T. S. Stribling's Birthright and Chesnutt's own Mandy Oxendine, there is a scene in which the segregation of blacks from whites on a train takes place.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – John Berendt

I approached this book, which Edmund White calls a 'non-fiction novel', with some caution because of its great popularity: I'm generally very suspicious of books that are popular. However, I was very pleasantly surprised, and also surprised that it has in fact proved so popular, as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is hardly a conventional novel. It's a love affair John Berendt had with Savannah, Georgia, and which brought a stream of tourists into the city in search of the human and architectural sights mentioned, such as Bonaventure Cemetery (where the poet Conrad Aiken's bench grave stands), or perhaps a sighting of Savannah's larger-than-life characters, like 'female impersonator' The Lady Chablis, or hope for an invitaton to a party such as the ones thrown by Joe Odom, the highly likeable con merchant. These characters move around the main story, which is the murder of the priapic Danny Hansford by his employer and occasional lover, the antique furniture dealer Jim Williams, who lived in the impressive Mercer House, the former home of songwriter Johnny Mercer. The novel is funny and fast-moving, but there is a structural problem: it is too episodic, and although the murder and subsequent trials are the central issue, the colourful characters who flit in and out of it somehow don't merge too well with this central interest.

Life in the Iron-Mills - Rebecca Harding Davis

First published in 1861 and based on the experiences of Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) in Wheeling, Virginia, which is today in West Virginia, Life in the Iron-Mills is now seen as a seminal work of American realism. This short story, originally published in Atlantic Monthly, was her masterpiece, and was rediscovered by Tillie Olsen, who wrote an Afterword to the Feminist Press edition in 1972.

Birthright - T. S. Stribling

See post for comment (using the 'SEARCH BLOG' facility to the top left of the page).

Feather Crowns - Bobbie Ann Mason

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café - Fannie Flagg

In Country - Bobbie Ann Mason

Mandy Oxendine - Charles W. Chesnutt

This novel was originally written towards the close of the 19th century, and was in fact the first novel Chesnutt wrote. However, The House behind the Cedars (1900) was his first published novel, and it would be 100 years after Mandy Oxendine was written that it was in fact published. This is the story of two mixed race lovers - both of whom could pass for white - Mandy and Tom Lowrey, who part for two years while Tom goes off to educate himself. When he comes back, it is to work in a school for black children, while Mandy is in a white school passing herself as white. Tom's problem is that Mandy now believes that she is in love with the rich womanizer Robert Utley, although the novel develops into a thriller - almost a whodunnit - when Utley is killed when attempting to sexually assault Mandy. A tale of race, class and gender conflict, Mandy Oxendine was considered too daring for publication at the time it was written.

Anitfanaticism: A Tale of the South, by Martha Haines Butt

An anti-Tom novel, and the only novel by this author.

Dorothy Allison – Bastard out of Carolina

Gods in Alabama - Joshilyn Jackson

Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-57

Fremsley (1987) – Ivor Cutler

A collection of poems, musings and observations from the eccentric Glaswegian Ivor Cutler, a man who was admired by people of all ages. When The New Musical Express once asked him how he would spend Christmas, he said in bed, with the bedclothes pulled around him until it went away. The most notable in the collection: 'A Strategy Suit with a Jelly Pocket'.

The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Volume Two: Passages in the Life of a Radical

Roger Vailland: the Man and His Masks – J. E. Flower

Mrs Caldwell Speaks to Her Son (1953; trans. 1968) – Camilo José Cela

Originally published as Mrs. Caldwell habla a su hijo.

Her (1960) – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti is best known as the co-founder of the City Lights bookstore and publisher on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA, which published Allen Ginsberg's first book of poems, Howl, in 1956. Ferlinguettti's most well known work is A Coney Island of the Mind (1960). The bookstore is recommended, as is the pub Vesuvio's next door to it (with Jack Kerouac Alley between), which is a kind of shrine to the Beat Generation.

As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) – Oliver St John Gogarty

Oliver St John Gogarty is perhaps best remembered for his relationship with James Joyce. A former drinking partner of Joyce's in the early years, Gogarty later became the butt of Joyces insults. In Joyce's early poem 'The Holy Office', Gogarty is represented as a snob, and more famously, there is another representation at the beginning of Ulysses (‘stately plump Buck Mulligan’) in the Martello tower: Joyce had stayed with Gogarty in the Martello tower at Sandy Cove.

The Days Before – Katherine Anne Porter

Critical essays from the Texan noted for her short stories Flowering Judas (1930) and Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and for her novel Ship of Fools (1962)

The American 1930s: A Literary History – Peter Conn

Interesting for its inclusion of a number of obscure writers.

A Feast of Snakes (1976) – Harry Crews

Harry Crews is one of the wild men of literature. Of working-class origin, Crews writes about the underbelly of America, of drugs, alcohol abuse, and trailer park communities in the Deep South, for instance. He was born in southern Georgia but has spent most of his life in Florida. The problem is perhaps that he also spent too long parodying himself, and it can make us forget his undoubted importance as a serious writer. This is a link to a youtube interview, in which he boasts of spending 30 years of his life drunk every day, and illustrates this problem very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpeFmXJG4Ak.

Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 Anne Goodwyn Jones

How Late It Was, How Late (1994) - James Kelman

James Kelman - H. Gustav Klaus

James Kelman - Simon Kövesi

The most comprehensive critical work on Kelman so far, although it was published too late to include his latest novel, Kieron Smith, Boy.

Translated Accounts - James Kelman

A Disaffection - James Kelman

The Ticket That Exploded - William Burroughs

Festus: A Poem - Philip J. Bailey

A plaque on a building on the north corner of Fletcher Gate and Middle Pavement, Nottingham, UK, reveals that the writer Philip James Bailey (1816–1902) once lived there. Bailey was born in Nottingham and educated in Glasgow, and is usually associated with the Spasmodic school of poetry along with J. W. Marston, S. T. Dobell, and Alexander Smith. He is most noted for Festus, a huge work to which Bailey was continually adding, and which was heavily influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost. Its most famous lines are: 'We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not breaths; / In feeling, not in figures on a dial / We should count time by theart throbs; he most lives / Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.' There is a bronze bust of Bailey by Albert Toft at the rear entrance to Nottingham Castle.

The Life and Times of Thomas Spence P. M. Ashraf

The Kretzmer Syndrome - Peter Way

The Withered Root (1929) - Rhys Davies

My Wales - Rhys Davies

Soldier Songs - Patrick Macgill

Skerrett - Liam O'Flaherty

A Pig in a Poke - Rhys Davies

The Home-Maker - Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Half an Eye: Sea Stories - James Hanley

The Contradictions - Zulfikar Ghose

The Death of Christopher - John Sommerfield

Boy James Hanley

Rhys Davies: A Critical Sketch - R. L. Mégroz

Ellen Glasgow - Barren Ground

The Back-to-Backs (1930) - J. C. Grant

A real obscurity. When it was published, this book – which depicts life in a mining community – was roundly attacked for what was considered to be a brutal attack on the life of miners. Very little is known of Grant, who also wrote poems, although his birth certificate reveals that he was born in Alnwick, Northumbria, to a father who was an author, newspaper editor, and manager.

Trouble dans les Andains - Boris Vian

Spacetime Inn - Lionel Britton

Senselessness - Horacio Castellanos Moya

Le Rivage des Syrtes - Julien Gracq

Rhinocéros - Eugène Ionesco

The Poor Mouth - Flann O'Brien

Out Such Between Through Christine Brooke-Rose

A Frolic of His Own - William Gaddis

Caligrammes - Guillaume Apollinaire

Belle du Seigneur - Albert Cohen

Plays, Poems and Theatre Writings - Joe Corrie

Trouble in Porter Street - John Sommerfield

Men Adrift - Anthony Bertram

Truly Obscure. A novel about philosopher and a writer who meet on a boat. They talk.